Tommy James, Greg Allman & My Mother

A long forgotten cassette tape resurfaced in my office last week. The sound quality was horrible and it was held together with old dried out masking tape. Still, I was glad to see that it had survived in a box of old stereo stuff buried deep in my closet.

The tape was recorded in May of 1968, the year I received my first cassette recorder. Years later I would become a stereo snob and switch to a dual cassette deck. This was not a dual cassette deck though – it was a cheap $30 Panasonic player/recorder but it opened up the door for a lifetime of musical enjoyment.

The old cassette tape actually came with the recorder and is labeled Panasonic C-30. One side is marked “Demonstration Tape.” The other side simply says “For Recording.”

I popped the tape into my 25 year-old cassette deck and heard the familiar voice of Chuck Leonard, a DJ with 77 WABC radio in New York and my mother. I had obviously held the crude microphone up to the radio’s speaker and you can faintly hear my mother talking on the phone in the background. The player apparently did not come with a “recording in progress” flashing red light.

Halfway through the first song, I Think We’re Alone Now by Tommy James and the Shondells, the music cuts off and the opening notes of Whipping Post by the Allman Brothers cuts in. Readers who are unfamiliar with the song should know that Whipping Post is a 23 minute jam on a record that was released in 1972. I probably recorded it over my first cassette in college when I ran short of tapes not realizing its historical significance.

Despite the lousy sound, I continued listening and was a little surprised when the guitar solo was cut short by a recording of Sussidio by Phil Collins. The hit song was released in 1985 and I remember recording it from an Lp I borrowed at the public library. Side one of the tape ended with more of the Allman Brothers song and finished with Chuck Leonard and my mother.

If a future civilization had uncovered this one tape and their spaceship happened to have a cassette player in the dashboard, Tommy James, Greg Allman, Phil Collins and my mother would represent all of the musical culture of our 20th Century. I admit that I am probably placing too much importance on this but an audio archeologist could peel off the different layers of recordings from the past 44 years and learn something about our culture or at least about my musical tastes.

Since that cassette tape was made I have recorded thousands of songs on tapes, discs and hard drives but I never worked so hard to capture music. I carefully held the cheap microphone up to the speaker of my cheap transistor radio and hit record at just the right moment – almost. I could only dream of a day that music came without DJs and commercials.

Today my I-Tunes playlist includes much clearer versions of every song on that old cassette with the exception of my mother’s voice. There is no compelling reason to play this old cassette again but I just don’t have the heart to toss it out. Instead, I will stash it back in the closet where some advanced civilization may find it and… never mind.